Now, I've read Leon, and I hope you will, too:
On the morning of November 1, 1755, an earthquake destroyed Lisbon. It lasted ten minutes, and concluded with a tsunami at the mouth of the Tagus River. Tens of thousands of people perished, and the philosophical confidence of Europe was forever shaken. When I began to grasp the magnitude of what the Asian ocean wreaked last week, it was to the Lisbon literature that I turned for assistance. I was in no mood to open a Bible. It is indecent to move immediately from catastrophe to theodicy. Evil should shock and disrupt. The humanity of the dead should be honored with the tribute of dissonance, the tribute of doubt. I do not see how a theistic view of the world cannot be embarrassed, or damaged, by such an event. If it is not possible to venerate nature for its goodness, then it is not possible to venerate the alleged author of nature for His goodness.
I understand that religion long ago learned how to argue its way around cosmic cruelty, but it is the absence of protest, the intellectual efficiency, that is so repugnant. Those who smugly intone that they have no explanation, that it is all a mystery, that the ways of the universe and its Creator exceed the capacities of the mind: they are over-ready for tragedy. They should more candidly admit that they choose not to reflect upon the spiritual implications of natural destruction, because they wish to protect what they believe. In the aftermath of such a disaster, religious people have more mental work to do than irreligious people, because they are the ones who teach the benevolent government of the world. Sometimes they teach much worse: the punitive explanation of suffering, the idea that this is not evil, it is justice. In the ruins of Lisbon, the "earthquake sermons" came in many varieties, but the most salient theme, to choose but one instance from a prominent Jesuit preacher, was this: "Learn, O Lisbon, that the destroyers of our houses, palaces, churches, and convents, the cause of the death of so many people and of the flames that devoured such vast treasures, are your abominable sins, and not comets, stars, vapors and exhalations, and similar natural phenomena." Such sentiments were heard from Muslim and Hindu clerics this week, and even the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel instructed "this is an expression of God's great ire with the world." All this is nothing other than a justification of the murder of children.
It was completely right that the horrors of Lisbon would throw Europe into a crisis of meaning, that Voltaire's denunciation of the faith that tout est bien would send seismic waves across an entire culture. In our tout est bien society, with its jolly religiosity and its cathedrals of optimism, I see prodigious American generosity (and prodigious talk about American generosity: finally our subject is always ourselves), but I do not see much serious reflection, at least publicly. The relief efforts in Asia may turn out to be one of American practicality's finest hours, but why are Americans so afraid of philosophy? We are not alone, of course, in our satisfaction with our condition. Rousseau responded to Voltaire's poem about Lisbon with an extraordinary letter in which he asked his wrathful elder to desist from "troubling peaceful souls" and disturbing the "sweet feeling of existence." In arguing for the acceptance of what transpired in Lisbon, Rousseau relinquished the side of the human: "The system of this universe which produces, conserves, and perpetuates all the thinking and feeling beings ought to be dearer to [God] than a single one of these beings; he can, therefore, despite all his goodness, or rather through his very goodness, sacrifice something of the happiness of individuals to the conservation of the whole." It is an old idea, this logical quietism. It is not exactly false, and it comes in secular versions, too. Rousseau was correct, certainly, about the impertinence in the conviction that man is the center of the universe. But the problem of human presumption aside, it is difficult to see how the moral sense can survive in a mind that does not genuinely recoil from the killing of innocents. We are the parts before we are the whole. The universe does not owe us sympathy, but we owe each other sympathy. When I see the images of the anguish on the other side of the world, the only knowledge that seems to matter is what Voltaire knew: le mal est sur la terre, evil is on the Earth.
